History of Philosophy Book Club

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a mathematician, a natural scientist, and a speculative metaphysician. Although today most students encounter him in the last of these roles as the author of the Meditations on First Philosophy, his influence on the other disciplines is arguably even more significant. In his Geometry, Descartes proposed a new method of geometric proof that made it possible to describe curves by means of algebraic equations (Cartesian coordinates). In his World or Treatise on Light, Descartes envisioned a universe governed entirely by mathematics, reducing physical phenomena to geometric explanations. In his writings on living things, Descartes proposed a notion of living organisms as machines governed by the same mathematical principles as his physics.

By the time that Descartes turned to metaphysics, he had embraced the method of geometric proof—deduction from seemingly indisputable basic premises—as the universal method for the discovery of knowledge. Just as the geometer begins by finding the most fundamental properties of lines, and by using these to deduce the properties of the most basic shapes—circles, triangles, squares—so Descartes attempts in his Meditations to set aside all beliefs that are capable of doubt and to deduce from the remaining residue of certainty a total view of the world and the soul. In attempting this, Descartes would raise philosophical issues that have remained salient for four centuries.

We will read Descartes’ Discourse on Method, the earliest statement of his methodical understanding of knowledge, along with the first seven chapters of his World or Treatise on Light, where he articulates his view of a purely mathematical world, stripped of all sensible qualities. We will read the Meditations, where he sets out the foundation of his metaphysical system in six days of reflection. Descartes circulated the Meditations among his friends and published seven sets of objections with his own replies attached. To get a sense of Descartes’ engagement with other thinkers of his time, we will read the third objections by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the fifth objections by French philosopher Pierre Gassendi.

Margaret Cavendish (1623 – 1673), nicknamed “the Mad Madge” for the novelty of her worldviews and for her brazen pursuit of fame, was a natural philosopher, a writer, a poet, a loyal lady in waiting to the English Queen in Exile, and allegedly a paralyzingly shy bookworm.
Throughout her life, Cavendish was surrounded by bright scientific minds. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, served as a personal tutor to William Cavendish, Margaret’s husband. She later challenged both Hobbes’s materialism and Descartes’s dualism by propounding a very novel conception of matter. Cavendish distinguished three “degrees” of matter: inanimate, or “dull,” matter, which “doth of itself lie still,” and the two animate degrees: sensitive and rational. Rational matter, according to Cavendish, is like “the architect,” sensitive matter is “the workman… always busily employed,” and the inanimate matter is the material used by the workman. In another allegory, she compares rational matter to the captain of the ship, sensitive matter to the sailors, and inanimate matter to the ship itself.

The novelty of this view lies in the equality of all matter – all things contain all three degrees: rational, sensitive, and inanimate. Cavendish uses this framework in her explanation of motion. In contrast to Descartes, she posits that motion is not transferred from one body to another but each objects moves rationally, in accordance with the “harmony of nature.” To demonstrate, Cavendish uses the image of the hand throwing a ball – “the motion by which, for example, the ball is moved is the ball’s own motion and not the hand’s that threw it, for the hand cannot transfer its own motion, which has a material being, out of itself and into the ball, or any other thing it handles, touches or moves, or else if it did, the hand would in a short time become weak and useless by losing so much substance.” The ball perceives the hand and responds to it rationally. Cavendish posits that the ball “sees” the hand moving and knows, in accordance with the kind of harmony of nature, that what it ought to do now is move in a particular way. The hand here triggers the ball to alter its own motion and serves as the occasion for the ball’s action. Thus, Margaret paints a curious picture of the world where all bodies perceive each other and respond in a kind of rational way in accordance with the harmony of nature.

How similar is Cavendish’s view of the world to panpsychism, where matter is self-conscious, consciousness is ubiquitous, primitive and omni-present? How close does she come to the Daoist vision of the world? Could a “thing” have a capacity to determine the direction of its own motion and chart its own path in the world or is Cavendish imagining a world of her fancy? In her fictional work, “The Blazing World,” she does pain a world inhabited by very polite sentient animals. She invites her readers to master fanciful worlds of their own: “By this Poetical Description, you may perceive, that my ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World; and that the Worlds I have made, both the Blazing- and the other Philosophical World, … are framed and composed of the most pure, that is, the Rational parts of Matter, which are the parts of my Mind…. I, esteeming Peace before Warr, Wit before Policy, Honesty before Beauty; instead of the figures of Alexander, Cesar, Hector, Achilles, Nestor, Ulysses, Hellen, &c. chose rather the figure of Honest Margaret Newcastle, which now I would not change for all this Terrestrial World; and if any should like the World I have made, and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such, …I mean in their Minds, Fancies or Imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be Subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please.”